"I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it." -- Trump, 12/11/18

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

First off, the "SWATting" death in Kansas: There's a lot that we don't know. But it sure looks as though the cops fired from across the street, behind some cover, and killed an innocent man over "furtive movement." The cops are going to say, of course, that it was a treasonable mistake.

I disagree. The cops summon a guy to the door, shine bright lights at him in the middle of the night and yell orders at him: What's reasonable is to expect the guy so summoned to be confused. If he's wearing sweatpants, he may need to pull them up and then it looks to the cops as he's reaching for a gun. It also appears that the cops were across the street, with rifles, crouched behind their cars, and to seriously believe that a guy is going to yank out a handgun and hit anything at that range in the dark is beyond credulity.

I hope they stick to it. Successor writers may try hard to stay with the spirit of the dead author, but like even the best art forgers, some of their own personality always leaks through. The finished product is almost always off in an intangible sense that a faithful reader will sense.

I was looking forward to the Z book, to see how Grafton closed out the tales of Kinsey Millhone. I can't imagine that I was the only one by a long shot.

Thirty years ago, also on December 28th, John D. MacDonald died. He had published what turned out to be the last book in the Travis McGee series, The Lonely Silver Rain. That book signaled that McGee, upon finding out that he had a teen-aged daughter, was going to jump headlong into not only being a father, but being responsible for another person. MacDonald's heirs have not let anyone else roll a sheet of Travis McGee into a typewriter.

I hope Grafton's survivors are cut from the same steel.

If you're a mystery reader, lift a glass in the memory of Sue Grafton, and to her characters that we've all come to know.

I just watched her interview on GMA. The interviewer asked Villa if she stood with the women who have accused Trump of assaulting them. The first time around, Villa answered by talking about herself. On a follow-up, Villa said that it was important for women to come forward and report sexual assaults.

Villa wants the cops to go after Lewandowski for slapping her on the ass, but she's still a loyal supporter pf the Ol' Pussy Grabber.

She'll be a good politician, for she can't answer a straight-forward question.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Pete Hoekstra, Trump's ambassador to the Netherlands, was asked by a Dutch reporter why he said there were Muslim-only "no-go" zones in Holland where cars and politicians were being set on fire. He denied saying that and said that claims that he said that were fake news.

So the reporter showed Hoekstra a video clip of him saying exactly that and asked Hoekstra why he said that it was fake news.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

UNSAT, people. It took the USAAF/USAF seventeen years to go from the initial design proposal for the B-52 to shutting down the production line after the final -H model was rolled out.

The Zoomies want to buy 660 engines. Right, and the original fleet took about 6,000 engines, plus spares. So back in the day, they made nearly ten times as many engines and the airplanes to go with them that it'll take just to make the engines.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Take a few minutes and enjoy.*(H/T)
__________________________*Three Ships is a pretty Christmas carol, but this verse is stupid:

O they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day, on Christmas day,
O they sailed into Bethlehem,
On Christmas day in the morning.

Bethlehem, at least the one that is said to be the birthplace of Jesus, is in the Judean Mountains and is about half-a-mile above sea level. Unless the ships were sailing up the Delaware River and into Bethlehem, PA. But the carol is English and is almost 400 years old, at least a century older than the Bethlehem with access to the sea.

If the objection was legitimate, they'd be making it to a Federal judge.

They're not. So it is all bullshit and smoke. Possibly, the true target audience for this is Trump himself. For this'll be all over Fox and Fiends, which will make the World's Oldest Toddler feel as though his lawyers are doing something.

"Crackdown" is an understatement. It's more like stamping on the faces of everyone, repeatedly. Digital tracking of everyone. Forced DNA collection. Collective punishment of family members. "Re-education" and secret executions. Requiring government bureaucrats to live in people's homes for a period of time to conduct at-home indoctrination.

Orwell didn't have the half of it. And somewhere, there are old Stasi members, shaking their heads over their glasses of brandy or beer and saying: "Man, that's some really intensive shit."

Crop dusting Aerial application is a lot safer than it once was, back when the airplane of choice was a converted Stearman. Spray rows were marked by "flaggers", kids who stood at the edge of the field and held up a flag to mark the edge of the las sprayed row.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Seventy-three years ago today, German Panzers tore through American lines in Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge was on.

In some ways, the German attack, which they called Operation Watch on the Rhine, was as foolhardy as Operation Market Garden. Both plans were overly ambitious and ended in failure. One difference was that the Western Allies had the resources to recover quickly from their combat losses. The Germans did not. American resistance was far stronger than the Germans anticipated. When the weather cleared on the 23rd, American defenders in Bastogne received resupply and medical aid by air, while the P-47s bombed and strafed every German tank and truck that they could see. The Luftwaffe tried a massive air-to-ground strike and ended up suffering so many losses, especially from the new VT-fuzed antiaircraft shells that they were effectively knocked out of the war.

But that's not what I want to write about.

My father was drafted into the Army when he turned 18. Things had cranked up to the point, by then, that when a young man registered for the draft, he could expect to receive orders to report in very short order. Dad was assigned to an infantry unit. That unit was training to fight in Europe and supposedly was to be into the war in the fall of 1944.

Sometime before then, Dad received orders to transfer to a tank-destroyer unit. It seemed that there was an entry in his personnel file that said that he had been trained in them. He hadn't. He'd never been near one. He told his sergeant that. The sergeant said not to worry, they'd teach him what he needed to know.

And so, Dad became a tank destroyer.

The tank destroyer battalion was slated to be in Operation Olympic. They were in Hawaii when the war ended. Dad's original infantry unit was in Belgium in December, 1944.

All this is family lore, of course. My father's records, along with millions of others, were lost in the National Archives Fire in St. Louis over 40 years ago. Dad passed in his early 70s from lung cancer.

But it gave me a lot of patience, when I was in the service, when I had to deal with the trials, tribulations and buraucracy of BuPers. For it was similar incompetents that may have saved my dad's life and, by extension, the lives of his children and grandchildren.

Friday, December 15, 2017

But when cops beat a black guy to death or shoot one in the back or shoot some kid kneeling in a hallway, the same folks on the Right will jump to defend the cops. They'll scream their defense for the cops and loudly proclaim that OK, maybe there are a few bad cops, but the vast majority of them are doing a hard and difficult job.

Funny how that same standard doesn't apply to the FBI in an instance where zero blood was shed.

So why hasn't the Right demanded that the police departments in Ferguson, Baltimore, North Charleston or Mesa be disbanded?

The underlying reason for this fuckery is that whatever Obama was for, Trump is against. Trump hates Obama so much that if Obama had made it harder to obtain opioids, Trump would have ordered that vicodin be handed out in schools after each recess.

for that's all of the thought that goes through Trump's mind about regulations. If Obama had a position on something, Trump takes the opposite tack. It's the actions of a surly toddler.

He either has the emotional maturity of a toddler, or he truly knows that he is guilty of collusion, if not outright treason, and he is willing to do anything to keep that from coming out. Even if it is acting like an uncontrollable three-year old and bringing down the country with him.

Either way, Trump, by his actions, has shown that he hates this country. That that's been a clear fact. For anyone who would back an accused child-molester for a senate seat in order to gain a short-term political advantage has no moral compass at all, nor love for democracy.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

In one of the reddest states in the nation, Steve Bannon managed to find a candidate so repugnant that Alabama's junior senator will now be a Democrat.

Bannon is starting to shape up like the latest iteration of the Tea Party. The GOP would have had a solid lock on the Senate a long time ago if not for Republican candidates supported by the Tea Party fringe.

The GOP itself lost a senate seat, but they dodged a bullet. Democrats would have hung Roy Moore around the necks of every Republican running in `18 to force them to justify being a candidate from the Party of Moore.

Then add to that the number of white Alabamians who are mad at Jones for prosecuting and convicting the two surviving Birmingham Church Bombers and you probably have enough voters to take Moore over the top.

I suppose that these folks will all be swearing allegiance to El Caudillo Trumpo.

So now we're going to have private spies to ferret out Trump's enemies. What's next, secret police?

Haven't we seen this movie before?

I got shit going on. Got a call from relatives; a wildfire is possibly going to burn their home down and they're bugging out. The fire was news to me, because everything on the media these days is about whatever stupid shit DFT did or said or tweeted.

And I've got no shortage of work to do right now. So look over the blogroll.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

The thrust seems to be a combination of "it was her fault" and "the court was mean to me!" Yep, the same court that could have sent the Swimming Rapist to prison for years (instead of three months in the county jail).

If he gets a new trial, maybe he might get to do some hard time.

Still, the truth of the matter is that, thanks to the Internet, Brock the Convicted Rapist will never outrun what he did.

On another note, Trump might have tweeted himself into a criminal charge. Or impeachment. Or not. So now, when did Trump know that Flynn was lying to the FBI? No doubt, the chorus of Trumpanzees will trip over their over-long ties, rushing to explain why obstructing justice is less of a heinous crime than is lying in a deposition on a civil matter.

I recently took a trip to visit my mother on her birthday. The return trip had me changing planes at Midway Airport. When I change flights there, if I don't have to rush to my next one, I like to go to the Battle of Midway exhibit and look at the SBD on display.

Those guys were all peacetime volunteers. It's probably a good bet that a fair number of the Americans at the battle, both junior officers and enlisted, had joined the Navy for a steady job and "three hots and a cot" during the Great Depression. War came calling, they stepped up and did their jobs.

The Battle of Midway was a turning point in the war, the high-water mark of Japanese expansion. Thing is about turning points, they're just of interest to historians. Most of the time, they're not apparent to those doing the fighting. It's just another day in the trenches/cockpit/engineering plant.

While I was sitting there for a bit, some dude told his girlfriend that the metal pipes under the airplane were used for launching it from a carrier:

They weren't. That's a bomb-trapeze. Its function is to swing the bomb out clear of the propeller's arc before releasing the bomb. SBDs dove at an angle of up to 80 degrees, their speed limited by perforated dive brakes. The bomb, of course, would free-fall upon release and, if not swung out clear of the propellor, would smash it.

And no, I didn't correct the dude at the airport. Though every fiber of me wanted to.

Saturday, December 2, 2017

I have a love of S&W K-frames. They are great guns. But this week, I jumped ship, a little:

That's a Ruger Security Six. If you look closely at the barrel, you'll see that the "RFTM Before Using This Gun, Moron" rollmark is not there. This is a late-`70s gun, produced before Ruger began so marking their guns.

All of the Security Sixes that I've seen recently all had the legalese rollmark and, on a 4" barrel, it is fucking hideous. This one didn't, and so.....

In these kind of investigations, they don't let the lower-ranking guys plead out unless they bring something of value to the table. So now there's going to be a lot of speculation as to whom Flynn is giving to the prosecutors.

Still, there is something gleefully ironic in the fact that the clown who led chants of "lock her up" is pleading out to a couple of felonies.

It's also becoming apparent that Trump might be in jeopardy under the Watergate Rule*:

If there is any indication that Trump also was trying to pressure the Republicans in Congress to force an early end to the Mueller investigation, then that's possibly going to fall under the heading of "obstruction of justice".

But don't worry, sports fans. The Right will somehow start screaming that "this is all Obama's fault."
_______________________________________* "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.